The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business, and Book Publishing

1981, hardcover edition, Wesleyan University Press, CT. 207 pages. When this book was first published many an eyebrow was raised. The author, at the time, had been a staff writer for The New Yorker for years. In this fascinating work, Whiteside reveals the fact that publishers have now become conglomerates, most interested in the bottom line. We're talking quantity, not quality. The so-called big deal, the stuff of big bucks, had descended on the literary world and that world was changed forever, many times to the detriment of individual authors. An inside story, not always a pretty one either. Any would-be author needs to read this book, line by line.